Friday, March 9, 2012

Amoeboid Robot Navigates Without a Brain - Technology Review: Umedachi's goal isn't simply to create a new kind of locomotion, however. He's exploring the way in which robots that lack a centralized command center -- i.e. a brain -- can accomplish things anyway. Slime molds are a perfect model for this sort of thing, because they don't even have the primitive neural nets that characterize the coordinated swimming and feeding actions in jellyfish...

A fully decentralized control using coupled oscillators with a completely local sensory feedback mechanism is realized by exploiting the global physical interaction between the body parts stemming from the fluid circuit. The experimental results show that this robot exhibits adaptive locomotion without relying on any hierarchical structure. The results obtained are expected to shed new light on the design scheme for autonomous decentralized control systems.